François-Marie Arouet (November 21, 1694—May 30, 1778), 
better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment 
writer, deist and philosopher.

Biography

Voltaire was born in Paris to François Arouet and Marie-Marguerite 
Daumart or D'Aumard. Both parents were of Poitevin extraction, but 
the Arouets were long established in Paris, the grandfather being 
a prosperous tradesman.

He was the fifth child of his parents, preceded by twin boys (one 
of whom survived), a girl, Marguerite-Catherine, and another boy 
who died young. Voltaire's mother died when he was seven years old. 
His father appears to have been strict, but neither inhospitable nor 
tyrannical. Marguerite Arouet, of whom her younger brother was very 
fond, married early; the elder brother, Armand, was a strong 
Jansenist and had a poor relationship with François.

The Abbé de Châteauneuf, a friend of François' mother, instructed 
him in les belles lettres and deism, and the child showed a faculty 
for facile verse-making. Aged ten he was sent to the Jesuitic 
Collège Louis-le-Grand, and remained there till 1711. Though he 
deprecated the education he had received, it formed the basis of 
his considerable knowledge, and probably kindled his lifelong 
devotion to the stage.

In his earliest school years the abbé presented him to the famous 
author Ninon de Lenclos. When she died, tragically, in 1705, she 
left him money so he could buy books. In August 1711, at the age 
of seventeen, he came home and the usual battle followed between 
a son who desired no profession but literature and a father who 
refused to consider literature a profession at all. So Voltaire 
studied law, at least nominally. The Abbé de Châteauneuf died 
before his godson left school, but he had already introduced him 
to the famous and dissipated coterie of the Temple, of which the 
grand prior Vendôme was the head, and the poets Chaulieu and La 
Fare were the chief literary stars. Voltaire's father tried to 
remove him from such society by sending him first to Caen and 
then, in the suite of the marquis de Châteauneuf, the abbé's 
brother, to The Hague. Here he met Olympe Dunoyer, a Protestant 
girl from a poor family, but his father stopped the affair by 
procuring a lettre de cachet, though he never used it.

Voltaire was sent home and, for a time, pretended to work in a 
Parisian lawyer's office but he again manifested a faculty for 
getting into trouble — this time in the still more dangerous way 
of writing libelous poems — so that his father was glad to send 
him to stay for nearly a year (1714-15) with Louis de Caumartin, 
marquis de Saint-Ange, in the country. Here he was still 
supposed to study law but devoted himself in part to literary 
essays and in part to storing up his immense treasure of gossiping 
history. Almost exactly at the time of the death of Louis XIV he 
returned to Paris, to fall once more into literary and Templar 
society and to make the tragedy of Oedipe, which he had already 
written, privately known. He was introduced to the famous 
"court of Sceaux", the circle of the beautiful and ambitious 
duchesse du Maine. It seems that Voltaire lent himself to the 
duchess' frantic hatred of the regent, Philippe II of Orléans, 
and helped compose lampoons on him. In May 1716 he was exiled, 
first to Tulle, then to Sully, later, having been allowed to 
return, he was suspected of having been concerned in the 
composition of two violent libels. Inveigled by a spy named 
Beauregard into a real or burlesque confession he was sent to 
the Bastille on May 16, 1717, here he recast Oedipe, began the 
Henriade and decided to change his name.

Ever after his exit from the Bastille in April 1718 he was known 
as Arouet de Voltaire, or simply Voltaire, though legally he 
never abandoned his patronymic. The origin of the name has been 
much debated and attempts have been made to show that it existed 
in the Daumart pedigree or in some territorial designation. Some 
maintain that it was an abbreviation of a childish nickname, "le 
petit volontaire". The balance of opinion has, however, always 
inclined to the hypothesis of an anagram on the name "Arouet le 
jeune" or "Arouet l.j.", 'u' being changed to 'v' and 'j' to 
'i' according to the ordinary rules of the game.

A further "exile" at Châtenay and elsewhere followed the 
imprisonment however, though Voltaire was admitted to an audience 
by the regent and treated graciously, he was not trusted. Oedipe 
was performed at the Théâtre Français on November 18 and was well 
received, though a rivalry grew between parties assisting its 
success. It had a run of forty-five nights and brought the author 
not a little profit, with these gains Voltaire seems to have 
begun his long series of successful financial speculations.

In the spring of the next year the production of Lagrange-Chancel's 
libels, entitled the Philippiques, again brought suspicion on 
Voltaire. He was informally exiled, and spent much time with Marshal 
Villars, again increasing his store of "reminiscences". He returned 
to Paris in the winter and his second play, Artemire, was produced 
in February 1720. It was a failure, and though it was recast with 
some success, Voltaire never published it as a whole and used parts 
of it in other work. He again spent much of his time with Villars, 
listening to the marshal's stories and making harmless love to the 
duchess.

In December 1721 his father died leaving him property, rather more
than four thousand livres a year, which was soon increased by a 
pension of half the amount from the regent. In return for this, or 
in hopes of more, he offered himself as a spy — or at any rate as 
a secret diplomatist — to Dubois, but meeting his old enemy 
Beauregard in one of the minister's rooms and making an offensive 
remark, he was waylaid by Beauregard some time after in a less 
privileged place and soundly beaten.

His visiting espionage, or secret diplomatic mission, began in the 
summer of 1722 and he set out for it in company with a certain 
Madame de Rupelmonde, to whom he, as usual, made love, taught 
deism and served as an amusing travelling companion. He stayed 
at Cambrai for some time, where European diplomatists were still 
in full session, journeyed to Brussels, where he met and quarrelled 
with Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, went on to the Hague and then 
returned. The Henriade had got on considerably during the journey 
and, according to his lifelong habit, the poet, with the help of 
his friend Thiériot and others, had been "working the oracle" of 
puffery.

During the late autumn and winter of 1722-1723 he lived chiefly in 
Paris, taking a kind of lodging in the town house of M. de 
Berniêres, a nobleman of Rouen and endeavouring to procure a 
"privilege" for his poem. In this he was disappointed but he had 
the work printed at Rouen nevertheless and spent the summer of 
1723 revising it. In November he caught smallpox and was seriously 
ill, so that the book was not given to the world till the spring of 
1724 (and then of course, as it had no privilege, appeared 
privately). Almost at the same time, on the 4th of March, his third 
tragedy, Marianne, appeared and was well received at first but 
underwent complete damnation before the curtain fell. The regent had 
died shortly before, not to Voltaire's advantage; for he had 
been a generous patron. Voltaire had made, however, a useful 
friend in another grand seigneur, as profligate and nearly as 
intelligent, the duke of Richelieu, and with him he passed 1724 
and the next year chiefly recasting the now successful Marianne, 
but also writing the comedy of L'Indiscret and courting the 
queen.


Exile to England

The end of 1725 brought a disastrous close to this period of his 
life. He was insulted by the chevalier de Rohan, replied with his 
usual sharpness of tongue, and shortly afterwards, when dining 
with the duke of Sully, was called out and beaten by the 
chevalier's hirelings, while Rohan watched.

On the morning appointed for the duel Voltaire was arrested and 
sent for the second time to the Bastille. He was kept in 
confinement a fortnight, and was then packed off to England in 
accordance with his own request.

Soon after his arrival, George I died and George II succeeded. 
The new king was not fond of poetry, but Queen Caroline was, and 
the kingdom's prestige was enhanced through welcoming a 
distinguished exile from French illiberality.

While in England Voltaire was attracted to the philosophy of John 
Locke and ideas of Sir Isaac Newton. He studied England's 
constitutional monarchy, its religious tolerance, its philosophical 
rationalism and most importantly the "natural sciences". Voltaire 
also greatly admired English religious toleration and freedom of 
speech, and saw these as necessary prerequisites for social and 
political progress. He saw England as a useful model for what 
he considered to be a backward France.


Return to Paris

He was full of literary projects, and immediately after his return 
is said to have increased his fortune immensely by a lucky lottery 
speculation. The Henriade was at last licensed in France; Brutus, 
a play which he had printed in England, was accepted for performance, 
but kept back for a time by the author; and he began the celebrated 
poem of the Pucelle, the amusement and the torment of great part of 
his life. But he had great difficulties with two of his chief works 
which were ready to appear, Charles XII and the Lettres sur les 
Anglais. With both he took all imaginable pains to avoid offending 
the censorship.

At the end of 1730 Brutus was actually staged. In the spring of the 
next year, Voltaire went to Rouen to get Charles XII surreptitiously 
printed. In 1732 two more tragedies appeared with great success: 
Eriphile and Zaire. In the following winter the death of the 
comtesse de Fontaine-Martel, whose guest and supposed lover he had 
been, turned him out of a comfortable abode. He then took lodgings 
with an agent of his, one Demoulin, in an out-of-the-way part of 
Paris, and was, for some time at least, as much occupied with 
contracts, speculation and all sorts of means of gaining money as 
with literature.

In the middle of this period, in 1733, two important books, the 
Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais and the Temple du gout 
appeared. Both were likely to make bad blood, for the latter was, 
under the mask of easy verse, a satire on contemporary French 
literature, especially on Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, and the former 
was, in the guise of a criticism or rather panegyric of English 
ways, an attack on everything established in the church and state 
of France. It was published with certain "remarks" on Blaise 
Pascal, more offensive to orthodoxy than itself, and no mercy was 
shown to it. The book was condemned (June 10, 1734), the copies 
seized and burned, a warrant issued against the author, and his 
dwelling searched. He himself was safe in the independent duchy 
of Lorraine with Emilie de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet, with 
whom he began to be intimate in 1733; he had now taken up his 
abode with her at the château of Cirey.


Cirey

If the English visit may be regarded as having finished Voltaire's 
education, the Cirey residence was the first stage of his literary 
manhood. He had written important and characteristic work before, 
but had not decided a direction. He now obtained a settled home for 
many years and, taught by his numerous brushes with the authorities, 
he began his future habit of keeping out of personal harm's way, 
and of at once denying any awkward responsibility, which made him 
for nearly half a century at once the leader of European heretics 
in regard to all established ideas. It was not till the summer of 
1734 that Cirey, a half-dismantled country house on the borders of 
Champagne, France and Lorraine, was fitted up with Voltaire's money 
and became the headquarters of himself, of his hostess, and now and 
then of her accommodating husband.

Emilie's temper was violent, and after a time she sought lovers who 
were not so much des cérébraux as Voltaire. Nevertheless, it 
provided him with a safe and comfortable retreat, and with every 
opportunity for literary work. In March 1735 the hat was formally 
taken off him, and he was at liberty to return to Paris, a liberty 
of which he availed himself sparingly. At Cirey he wrote 
indefatigably and did not neglect business. The principal literary 
results of his early years here were the Discours en vers sur 
l'Homme, the play of Aizire and L'Enfant prodigue (1736), and a 
long treatise on the Newtonian system which he and Madame du 
Chatelet wrote together.

In the very first days at Cirey he had written a pamphlet with the 
title of Treatise on Metaphysics. In March 1736 he received his first 
letter from Frederick II of Prussia, then crown prince. He was 
soon again in trouble, this time for the poem, Le Mondain, and he 
at once crossed the frontier and made for Brussels. He spent about 
three months in the Low Countries, but in March 1737 returned to 
Cirey and continued writing, making experiments in physics (he 
had at this time a large laboratory), and busying himself with 
iron-founding, the chief industry of the district.

The best-known accounts of Cirey life, those of Madame de 
Grafigny, date from the winter of 1738-39; they are very 
amusing, depicting the frequent quarrels between Madame du 
Chatelet and Voltaire, his intense suffering under criticism, 
his constant dread of the surreptitious publication of the 
Pucelle (which nevertheless he could not keep his hands from 
writing or his tongue from reciting to his visitors), and so 
forth.

In April 1739 a journey was made to Brussels, to Paris, and 
then again to Brussels, which was the headquarters for a 
considerable time, owing to some law affairs, of the Du 
Chatelets. Frederick, now king of Prussia, made not a few 
efforts to get Voltaire away from Madame du Chatelet, but 
unsuccessfully, and the king earned the lady's cordial hatred 
by persistently refusing or omitting to invite her.

At last, in September 1740, master and pupil met for the first 
time at Cleves, an interview followed three months later by a 
longer visit. Brussels was again the headquarters in 1741, by 
which time Voltaire had finished two of his best plays, Mérope 
and Mahomet.

Mahomet was first performed at Lille in that year; it did not 
appear in Paris till August next year, and Mérope not till 
1743. This last was, and deserved to be, the most successful 
of its author's whole theatre. It was in this same year that 
he received the singular diplomatic mission to Frederick which 
nobody seems to have taken seriously, and after his return the 
oscillation between Brussels, Cirey and Paris was resumed.

During these years much of the Essai sur les moeurs and the 
Siècle de Louis XIV was composed. He also returned, not too 
well advisedly, to the business of courtiership, which he had 
given up since the death of the regent. He was much employed, 
owing to Richelieu's influence, in the fetes of the dauphin 
(Louis, dauphin de France)'s marriage, and was rewarded 
through the influence of Madame de Pompadour on New Year's 
Day 1745 by the appointment to the post of 
historiographer-royal, temporarily achieving a secure social 
and financial position.

In the same year he wrote a poem on Fontenoy, he received 
medals from the pope and dedicated Mahomet to him, and he 
wrote court divertissements and other things to admiration. 
But he was not a thoroughly skilful courtier, and one of the 
best known of Voltairians is the contempt or at least silence 
with which Louis XV received the maladroit and almost insolent 
inquiry Trajan est-il content? addressed in his hearing to 
Richelieu at the close of a piece in which the emperor had 
appeared with a transparent reference to the king.

All this assentation had at least one effect. He, who had been 
for years admittedly the first writer in France, was at last 
elected to the Académie française in the spring of 1746.

Then the tide began to turn. His favour at court had naturally 
exasperated his enemies; it had not secured him any real 
friends, and even a gentlemanship of the chamber was no solid 
benefit, except from the money point of view. He did not indeed 
hold it very long, but was permitted to sell it for a large 
sum, retaining the rank and privileges. He had various proofs 
of the instability of his hold on the king during 1747 and in 
1748. He once lay in hiding for two months with the duchesse 
du Maine at Sceaux, where were produced the comedietta of La 
Prude and the Tragedie de Rome sauvée, and afterwards for a 
time lived chiefly at Lunéville; here Madame du Chatelet had 
established herself at the court of King Stanislaus I of 
Poland, and carried on a liaison with the soldier-poet, Jean 
François de Saint-Lambert, an officer in the king's guard. In 
September 1749 she died after the birth of a child.

Madame du Chatelet's death is another turning-point in 
Voltaire's life. He was deeply disturbed for a time, and 
considered settling down in Paris. He went on writing satires 
like Zadig, and engaged in a literary rivalry with Crébillon 
père, a rival set up against him by Madame de Pompadour.


Frederick the Great

In 1751, Voltaire accepted Frederick of Prussia's invitations 
and moved to Berlin.

At first the king behaved altogether like a king to his guest. 
He pressed him to remain; he gave him (the words are 
Voltaire's own) one of his orders, twenty thousand francs a 
year, and four thousand additional for his niece, Madame 
Jenis, in case she would come and keep house for her uncle. 
Voltaire insisted for the consent of his own king, which was 
given without delay. But Frenchmen regarded Voltaire as 
something of a deserter; and it was not long before he bitterly 
repented his desertion, though his residence in Prussia lasted 
nearly three years. It was quite impossible that Voltaire and 
Frederick should get on together for long. Voltaire was not 
humble enough to be a mere butt, as many of Frederick's led 
poets were; he was not enough of a gentleman to hold his own 
place with dignity and discretion; he was constantly jealous 
both of his equals in age and reputation, such as Maupertuis, 
and of his juniors and inferiors, such as Baculard D'Arnaud. 
He was restless, and in a way Bohemian. Frederick, though his 
love of teasing for teasing's sake has been exaggerated by 
Macaulay, was a martinet of the first water, had a sharp though 
one-sided idea of justice, and had not the slightest intention 
of allowing Voltaire to insult or to tyrannize over his other 
guests and servants.

Voltaire had not been in the country six months before he 
engaged in a discreditable piece of financial gambling with 
Hirsch, the Dresden Jew. He was accused of forgery -- of 
altering a paper signed by Hirsch after he had signed it. The 
king's disgust at this affair (which came to an open scandal 
before the tribunals) was so great that he was on the point 
of ordering Voltaire out of Prussia, and Darget the secretary 
had trouble resolving the matter (February 1751). However, he 
succeeded in finishing and printing the Siècle de Louis XIV, 
while the Dictionnaire philosophique is said to have been 
devised and begun at Potsdam.

In the early autumn of 1751 one of the king's parasites, and 
a man of much more talent than is generally allowed, horrified 
Voltaire by telling him that Frederick had in conversation 
applied to him (Voltaire) a proverb about "sucking the orange 
and flinging away its skin", and about the same time the 
dispute with Pierre de Maupertuis, which had more than anything 
else to do with his exclusion from Prussia, came to a head. 
Maupertuis got into a dispute with one Konig. The king took 
his president's part; Voltaire took Konig's. But Maupertuis 
must needs write his Letters, and thereupon (1752) appeared 
one of Voltaire's most famous, though perhaps not one of his 
most read works, the Histoire du docteur Akakia et du natif 
de Saint-Malo. Even Voltaire did not venture to publish this 
lampoon on a great official of a prince so touchy as the king 
of Prussia without some permission, and if all tales are 
true, he obtained this by another piece of something like 
forgery—getting the king to endorse a totally different 
pamphlet on its last leaf, and affixing that last leaf to 
Akakia. Of this Frederick was not aware; but he did get some 
wind of the diatribe itself, sent for the author, heard it 
read to his own great amusement, and either actually burned 
the manuscript or believed that it was burnt. In a few days 
printed copies appeared.

Frederick did not like disobedience, but he still less liked 
being made a fool of, and he put Voltaire under arrest. But 
again the affair blew over, the king believing that the 
edition of Akakia confiscated in Prussia was the only one. 
Alas! Voltaire had sent copies away; others had been printed 
abroad; and the thing was irrecoverable. It could not be 
proved that he had ordered the printing, and all Frederick 
could do was to have the pamphlet burnt by the hangman. Things 
were now drawing to a crisis.

One day Voltaire sent his orders back; the next Frederick 
returned them, but Voltaire had quite made up his mind to 
fly. A kind of reconciliation occurred in March, and after 
some days of good-fellowship Voltaire at last obtained the 
long-sought leave of absence and left Potsdam on the 26th 
of the month (1753). It was nearly three months afterwards 
that the famous, ludicrous and brutal arrest was made at 
Frankfurt, on the persons of himself and his niece, who had 
met him meanwhile.

There was a rather distinct excuse for Frederick's wrath. In 
the first place, the poet chose to linger at Leipzig. In the 
second place, in direct disregard of a promise given to 
Frederick, a supplement to Akakia appeared, more offensive 
than the main text. From Leipzig, after a month's stay, 
Voltaire moved to Gotha. Once more, on the 25th of May, he 
moved on to Frankfurt. Frankfurt, nominally a free city, but 
with a Prussian resident who did very much what he pleased, 
was not like Gotha and Leipzig. An excuse was provided in 
the fact that the poet had a copy of some unpublished poems 
of Frederick's, which would have implicated Frederick's 
homosexuality were they to be published, and as soon as 
Voltaire arrived hands were laid on him, at first with 
courtesy enough. The resident, Freytag, was not a very wise 
person (though he probably did not, as Voltaire would have 
it, spell "poésie" (poetry) "poéshie"); constant references 
to Frederick were necessary; and the affair was prolonged so 
that Madame Denis had time to join her uncle. At last 
Voltaire tried to steal away. He was followed, arrested, his 
niece seized separately, and sent to join him in custody; and 
the two, with the secretary Collini, were kept close prisoners 
at an inn called the Goat.

This situation was at last put an end to by the city authorities, 
who probably felt that they were not playing a very creditable 
part. Voltaire left Frankfurt on the 7th of July, travelled 
safely to Mainz, and thence to Mannheim, Strassburg and Colmar. 
The last-named place he reached (after a leisurely journey and 
many honours at the little courts just mentioned) at the 
beginning of October, and here he proposed to stay the winter, 
finish his Annals of the Empire and look about him.

Voltaire's second stage was now over. Even now, however, in 
his sixtieth year, it required some more external pressure to 
induce him to make himself independent. He had been, in the 
first blush of his Frankfort disaster, refused, or at least 
not granted, permission even to enter France proper. At Colmar 
he was not safe, especially when in January 1754 a pirated 
edition of the Essai sur les moeurs, written long before, 
appeared. Permission to establish himself in France was now 
absolutely refused. Nor did an extremely offensive performance 
of Voltaire's—the solemn partaking of the Eucharist at Colmar 
after due confession—at all mollify his enemies. His exclusion 
from France, however, was chiefly metaphorical, and really 
meant exclusion from Paris and its neighbourhood. In the summer 
he went to Plombières, and after returning to Colmar for some 
time, journeyed in the beginning of winter to Lyons, and thence 
in the middle of December to Geneva.

Voltaire had no plans to remain in the city, and immediately 
bought a country house just outside the gates, which he named 
Les Délices. He was here practically at the meeting-point of 
four distinct jurisdictions—Geneva, the canton Vaud, Sardinia, 
and France, while other cantons were within easy reach; and he 
bought other houses dotted about these territories, so as 
never to be without a refuge close at hand in case of sudden 
storms. At Les Délices he set up a considerable establishment, 
which his great wealth made him able easily to afford. He kept 
open house for visitors; he had printers close at hand in 
Geneva; he fitted up a private theatre in which he could enjoy 
what was perhaps the greatest pleasure of his whole life—acting 
in a play of his own, stage-managed by himself. His residence at 
Geneva brought him into correspondence (at first quite amicable) 
with the most famous of her citizens, Rousseau. His Orphelin de 
Chine, performed at Paris in 1755, was very well received; the 
notorious La Pucelle appeared in the same year. The earthquake 
at Lisbon, which appalled other people, gave Voltaire an excellent 
opportunity for ridiculing the beliefs of the orthodox, first in 
verse (1756) and later in the unsurpassable tale of Candide 
(1759).

All was, however, not yet quite smooth with him. Geneva had a 
law expressly forbidding theatrical performances in any 
circumstances whatever. Voltaire had infringed this law already 
as far as private performances went, and he had thought of 
building a regular theatre, not indeed at Geneva but at Lausanne. 
In July 1755 a very polite and, as far as Voltaire was concerned, 
indirect resolution of the Consistory declared that in 
consequence of these proceedings of the Sieur de Voltaire the 
pastors should notify their flocks to abstain, and that the chief 
syndic should be informed of the Consistory's perfect confidence 
that the edicts would be carried out. Voltaire obeyed this hint 
as far as Les Délices was concerned, and consoled himself by 
having the performances in his Lausanne house. But he never was 
the man to take opposition to his wishes either quietly or without 
retaliation. He undoubtedly instigated d'Alembert to include a 
censure of the prohibition in his Encyclopédie article on 
"Geneva," a proceeding which provoked Rousseau's celebrated 
Lettre à D'Alembert sur les spectacles. As for himself, he 
looked about for a place where he could combine the social 
liberty of France with the political liberty of Geneva, and he 
found one.


Ferney

At the end of 1758 he bought the considerable property of 
Ferney, on the shore of the lake, about four miles from Geneva, 
and on French soil. At Les Délices (which he sold in 1765) he 
had become a householder on no small scale; at Ferney (which 
he increased by other purchases and leases) he became a 
complete country gentleman, and was henceforward known to 
all Europe as squire of Ferney. Many of the most celebrated 
men of Europe visited him there, and large parts of his usual 
biographies are composed of extracts from their accounts of 
Ferney. His new occupations by no means quenched his literary 
activity - he reserved much time for work and for his immense 
correspondence, which had for a long time once more included 
Frederick, the two getting on very well when they were not in 
contact.

Above all, he now being comparatively secure in position, 
engaged much more strongly in public controversies, and resorted 
less to his old labyrinthine tricks of disavowal, garbled 
publication and private libel. The suppression of the 
Encyclopédie, to which he had been a considerable contributor, 
and whose conductors were his intimate friends, drew from him 
a shower of lampoons directed now at l'infâme. These were 
directed at literary victims such as Lefranc de Pompignan or 
Palissot. Further lampoons were directed at Fréron, an excellent 
critic and a dangerous writer, who had attacked Voltaire from 
the conservative side, and at whom the patriarch of Ferney, as 
he now began to be called, levelled in return the very inferior 
farce-lampoon of L'Ecossaise, of the first night of which Fréron 
himself did an admirably humorous criticism.

How he built a church and got into trouble in so doing at Ferney, 
how he put "Deo erexit Voltaire" on it (1760-1761) and obtained a 
relic from the pope for his new building, how he entertained a 
grand-niece of Corneille, and for her benefit wrote his 
well-known "commentary" on that poet, are matters of interest, 
indeed.

Here, too, he began that series of interferences on behalf of 
the oppressed and the ill-treated which is an honour to his 
memory. Volumes and almost libraries have been written on the 
Calas affair, and we can but refer here to the only less famous 
cases of Sirven (very similar to that of Calas, though no judicial 
murder was actually committed), Espinasse (who had been sentenced 
to the galleys for harbouring a Protestant minister), Lally (the 
son of the unjustly treated but not blameless Irish-French 
commander in India), D'Etalonde (the companion of La Barre), 
Montbailli and others.

In 1768 he entered into controversy with the bishop of the 
diocese; he had differences with the superior landlord of part 
of his estate, the president De Brosses; and he engaged in a 
long and tedious return match with the republic of Geneva. But 
the general events of this Ferney life are somewhat of that 
happy kind which are no events.


In this way Voltaire, who had been an old man when he established 
himself at Ferney (now Ferney-Voltaire), became a very old one 
almost without noticing it. The death of Louis XV and the 
accession of Louis XVI excited even in his aged breast the hope 
of re-entering Paris, but he did not at once receive any 
encouragement, despite the reforming ministry of Turgot. A much 
more solid gain to his happiness was the adoption, or practical 
adoption, in 1776 of Reine Philiberte de Varicourt, a young girl 
of noble but poor family, whom Voltaire rescued from the convent, 
installed in his house as an adopted daughter, and married to 
the marquis de Villette.

Voltaire returned to a hero's welcome in Paris at age 83 in 
time to see his last play, Irene, produced. The excitement of 
the trip was too much for him and he died in Paris on May 30, 
1778. Stories about his death in a state of terror and despair 
are false. Because of his criticism of the church Voltaire was 
denied burial in church ground. He was finally buried at an 
abbey in Champagne. In 1791 his remains were moved to a resting 
place at The Panthéon in Paris.

His final resting place, unfortunately, became a garbage heap. 
In 1814 a right-wing religious group (The Ultras) robbed his 
grave and disposed of him in a nearby garbage heap, no one the 
wiser (for more than 50 years) until his sarcophagus was 
inspected and discovered... empty. All that remains of this 
noble champion of the opressed is his heart - at the Paris, 
Bibliotheque Nationale.

His works

Vast and various as the work of Voltaire is, its vastness and 
variety are of the essence of its writer's peculiar quality. 
The divisions of it have long been recognized, and may be 
treated regularly.


Overview-major works

    * Oedipe (1718)
    * Zaire, (play) (1732) -- play
    * Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733), revised 
    as Letters on the English (c. 1778)
    * Le Mondain (1736)
    * Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)
    * Zadig (1747)
    * Micromegas (1752)
    * Candide (1759)
    * Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
    * Épître à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs (Letter 
    to the author of The Three Impostors) (1770)



Theatre

He wrote between fifty and sixty plays (including a few 
unfinished ones). Ironically, despite Voltaire's comic 
talent, he wrote only one good comedy, Nanine, but many good 
tragedies - two of them, Zaire and Mérope, are ranked among 
the ten or twelve best plays of the whole French classical 
school.

    * Ecossaise
    * Eriphile (1732)
    * Mahomet
    * Mérope
    * Nanine
    * Zaire (1732)



Poetry

As regards his poems proper, of which there are two long 
ones, the Henriade, and the Pucelle, besides smaller pieces, 
of which a bare catalogue fills fourteen royal octavo columns, 
their value is very unequal. The Henriade has by wide consent 
been relegated to the position of a school reading book. 
Constructed and written in almost slavish imitation of Virgil, 
employing for medium a very unsuitable vehicle—the Alexandrine 
couplet (as reformed and rendered monotonous for dramatic 
purposes)—and animated neither by enthusiasm for the subject 
nor by real understanding thereof, it could not but be an 
unsatisfactory performance.

The Pucelle, if morally inferior, is from a literary point of 
view of far more value, it is desultory to a degree; it is a 
base libel on religion and history; it differs from its model 
Lodovico Ariosto in being, not, as Ariosto is, a mixture of 
romance and burlesque, but a sometimes tedious tissue of 
burlesque pure and simple. Nevertheless, with all the 
Pucelle's faults, it is amusing. The minor poems are as much 
above the Pucelle as the Pucelle is above the Henriade.


Prose romances or tales

These productions—incomparably the most remarkable and most 
absolutely good fruit of his genius—were usually composed as 
pamphlets, with a purpose of polemic in religion, politics,
 or what not. Thus Candide attacks religious and philosophical 
 optimism, L'Homme aux quarante ecus certain social and 
 political ways of the time, Zadig and others the received 
 forms of moral and metaphysical orthodoxy, while some are mere 
 lampoons on the Bible, the unfailing source of Voltaire's wit. 
 But (as always happens in the case of literary work where the 
 form exactly suits the author's genius) the purpose in all 
 the best of them disappears almost entirely.

It is in these works more than in any others that the peculiar 
quality of Voltaire—ironic style without exaggeration—appears. 
If one especial peculiarity can be singled out, it is the 
extreme restraint and simplicity of the verbal treatment. 
Voltaire never dwells too long on this point, stays to laugh 
at what he has said, elucidates or comments on his own jokes, 
guffaws over them or exaggerates their form. The famous "pour 
encourager les autres" (that the shooting of Byng did 
"encourage the others" very much is not to the point) is a 
typical example, and indeed the whole of Candide shows the 
style at its perfection. Voltaire has, in common with Jonathan 
Swift, the distinction of paving the way for science fiction's 
philosophical irony. See especially Micromegas.


Historical

This division of Voltaire's work is the bulkiest of all except 
his correspondence, and some parts of it are or have been among 
the most read, but it is far from being even among the best. The 
small treatises on Charles XII and Peter the Great are indeed 
models of clear narrative and ingenious if somewhat superficial 
grasp and arrangement. The so-called Siècle de Louis XIV of 
France and Siecle de Louis XV. (the latter inferior to the 
former but still valuable) contain a great miscellany of 
interesting matter, treated by a man of great acuteness and 
unsurpassed power of writing, who had also had access to much 
important private information. But even in these books defects 
are present, which appear much more strongly in the singular 
olla podrida entitled Essai sur les moeurs, in the Annales de 
Vempire and in the minor historical works.



Philosophy

To his own age Voltaire was pre-eminently a poet and a philosopher; 
the unkindness of succeeding ages has sometimes questioned whether 
he had any title to either name, and especially to the latter. His 
largest philosophical work, at least so called, is the curious 
medley entitled Dictionnaire philosophique, comprising articles 
contributed by him to the great Encyclopédie and of several minor 
pieces. No one of Voltaire's works shows his anti-religious or at 
least anti-ecclesiastical animus more strongly. The various 
title-words of the several articles are often the merest stalking 
horses, under cover of which to shoot at the Bible or the church, 
the target being now and then shifted to the political institutions 
of the writer's country. his personal foes, etc., and the whole 
being largely seasoned with that acute, rather superficial, 
common-sense, but also commonplace, ethical and social criticism 
which the 18th century called philosophy. The book ranks perhaps 
second only to the novels as showing the character, literary and 
personal, of Voltaire; and despite its form it is nearly as 
readable.


Miscellaneous

In general criticism and miscellaneous writing Voltaire is not 
inferior to himself in any of his other functions. Almost all his 
more substantive works, whether in verse or prose, are preceded by 
prefaces of one sort or another, which are models of his own light 
pungent causerie; and in a vast variety of nondescript pamphlets 
and writings he shows himself a perfect journalist. In literary 
criticism pure and simple his principle work is the Commentaire 
sur Corneille, though he wrote a good deal more of the same 
kind—sometimes (as in his Life and notices of Molière) independently 
sometimes as part of his Siécles. Nowhere, perhaps, except when he 
is dealing with religion, are Voltaire's defects felt more than 
here. He was quite unacquainted with the history of his own 
language and literature, and more here than anywhere else he 
showed the extraordinarily limited and conventional spirit which 
accompanied the revolt of the French 18th century against limits 
and conventions in theological, ethical and political matters.


Correspondence

There remains only the huge division of his correspondence, which 
is constantly being augmented by fresh discoveries, and which, 
according to Georges Bengesco, has never been fully or correctly 
printed, even in some of the parts longest known. In this great 
mass Voltaire's personality is of course best shown, and perhaps 
his literary qualities not worst. His immense energy and 
versatility, his adroit and unhesitating flattery when he chose 
to flatter, his ruthless sarcasm when he chose to be sarcastic, 
his rather unscrupulous business faculty, his more than rather 
unscrupulous resolve to double and twist in any fashion so as to 
escape his enemies—all these things appear throughout the whole 
mass of letters.

Voltaire's works, and especially his private letters, constantly 
contain the word l'infâme and the expression (in full or 
abbreviated) écrasez l'infâme. This has been misunderstood in 
many ways - the mistake going so far as in some cases to suppose 
that Voltaire meant Christ by this opprobrious expression. No 
careful and competent student of his works has ever failed to 
correct this gross misapprehension. L'infâme is not God; it is not 
Christ; it is not Christianity; it is not even Catholicism. Its 
briefest equivalent may be given as "persecuting and privileged 
orthodoxy" in general, and, more particularly, it is the 
particular system which Voltaire saw around him, of which he 
had felt the effects in his own exiles and the confiscations of 
his books, and of which he saw the still worse effects in the 
hideous sufferings of Calas and La Barre.


His legacy

Most judgments of Voltaire have been unduly coloured by sympathy 
with or dislike of what may be briefly called his polemical side. 
When sympathy and dislike are discarded or allowed for, he remains 
one of the most astonishing, if not exactly one of the most 
admirable, figures of letters. That he never, as Carlyle 
complains, gave utterance to one great thought is strictly 
true. That his characteristic is for the most part an almost 
superhuman cleverness rather than positive genius is also 
true. But that he was merely a mocker, which Carlyle and others 
have also said, is not strictly true or fair. In politics proper 
he seems indeed to have had few or no constructive ideas, and to 
have been entirely ignorant or quite reckless of the fact that 
his attacks were destroying a state of things for which as a 
whole he neither had nor apparently wished to have any 
substitute. In religion he protested stoutly, and no doubt 
sincerely, that his own attitude was not purely negative; but 
here also he seems to have failed altogether to distinguish 
between pruning and cutting down. Both here and elsewhere his 
great fault was an inveterate superficiality. But this 
superficiality was accompanied by such wonderful acuteness 
within a certain range, by such an absolutely unsurpassed literary 
aptitude band sense of style in all the lighter and some of the 
graver modes of literature, by such untiring energy and 
versatility in enterprise, that he has no parallel among ready 
writers anywhere. Not the most elaborate work of Voltaire is of 
much value for matter; but not the very slightest work of 
Voltaire is devoid of value in form. In literary craftsmanship, 
at once versatile and accomplished, he has no superior and 
scarcely a rival.

Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and 
ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the 
commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a 
static force only useful as a counterbalance since its 
"religious tax", or the tithe, helped to cement a powerbase 
against the monarchy.

Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the 
idiocy of the masses. To Voltaire only an enlightened monarch, 
advised by philosophers like himself, could bring about change 
as it was in the king's rational interest to improve the power 
and wealth of France in the world. Voltaire is quoted as saying 
that he "would rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of (his own) 
species". Voltaire essentially believed monarchy to be the key 
to progress and change.

He is best known in this day and age for his novel, Candide ou 
l'Optimisme (1759), which satirizes the philosophy of 
Gottfried Leibniz. Candide was subject to censorship and 
Voltaire did not openly claim it as his own work [1] 
(http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA/Candide/Candide.letter.html).

Voltaire is also known for many memorable aphorisms, like Si 
Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer ("If God did not 
exist, it would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a 
verse epistle from 1768, addressed to the anonymous author of 
a controversial work, The Three Impostors.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, not to be confused with the 
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sent a copy of his "Ode 
to Posterity" to Voltaire. Voltaire read it through and said, 
"I do not think this poem will reach its destination."

The town of Ferney (France) where he lived his last 20 years 
of life, is now named Ferney-Voltaire. His Château is now a 
museum (L'Auberge de l'Europe).